Question: is the cycle long enough to effectively heat the surface to drive
off the contamination? Are the pulses being driven at a high current for the
milliseconds that they are on? By high current, I'm speaking of a rate that
exceeds nominal by say- 2x to 3x? My understanding of the physics of cleaning
the surface requires heating on either an instantaneous or continual basis to
be effective in driving the contamination off of the cathode to expose a clean
surface.
I like the approach and would love to see a couple contaminated nixies (of the
same type) subjected to some period of time using your method and conventional
cycling and compare the outcome after months of operation.
Nice video!
Jeff
-------- Original message --------From: 'Spirit's lab' via neonixie-l
<neonixie-l@googlegroups.com> Date: 3/7/18 10:48 AM (GMT-06:00) To:
neonixie-l <neonixie-l@googlegroups.com> Subject: [neonixie-l] An investigation
into better ways to do cathode poisoning prevention - 1000 fps slow motion
included
While designing my own clock, I decided to investigate the cathode poisoning
prevention methods utilized by most clocks, and I discovered that there's room
to improve and experiment.Here's a short video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skBwGGQ58MIIf you can't or don't want to watch:
Switching between cathodes with a delay of 1-2 milliseconds is going to provide
the same cleaning effect as the "slot machine", except without the extreme
flicker which may be annoying to some.
As for my design - it's two HV5522s in the PLCC package connected to an
ESP8266(for driving the HV5522s the 3v3 signals are shifted to 5 - that works
up to a supply of 12.9V) and Yan's NCH6100HV boost board.
It would be interesting to see what everyone here thinks.